Service provision and reconfiguration management in 4G mobile networks

Global vision consensus on the next generation of wireless mobile communications, broadly termed 4G, sketches a heterogeneous infrastructure, comprising different wireless access systems in a complementary manner and vested with reconfiguration capabilities that will facilitate a more flexible and dynamic adaptation of the wireless infrastructure to meet the ever-changing service requirements. We present the generic stages of reconfiguration procedures and identify the management requirements in the context of these stages. Next, we introduce a generic, platform-independent reconfiguration management framework to be hosted on end systems and elaborate on its main components.